Kansas City Star. August 24, 2023.
Editorial: Need help with Medicaid or kids’ insurance in Missouri? You’ll wait on hold
Here’s a sure sign of bad customer service: Long hold times.
We’ve all been there. You call up a hotline for a company or government agency to resolve an important problem, only nobody can take your call right away. So you sit and wait — through awful music and occasional assurances that “your call is very important to us,” hoping and waiting for an actual human to come on the line.
Is there anything more frustrating?
Maybe not in Missouri, and certainly not for Medicaid applicants. The state just might just be the reigning grand champion of terrible service for its most vulnerable residents.
Earlier this month, the federal government issued warnings to 16 states — including Missouri and Kansas — for exceptionally long wait times at the call centers that help residents complete applications and renewals for Medicaid and the Children’s Health Insurance Program.
Missouri reportedly had the very worst wait times of any state — an average of 48 minutes per call in the month of May. That’s so long that 44% of callers simply gave up rather than see the call through to its completion.
Missouri officials say revised and resubmitted data from the state’s call centers show an average wait time of a mere 28 minutes per call in May. That’s still slightly higher than the 25 minutes-per-call average in the states that received warnings. Since then, officials say they’ve managed to get wait times under 20 minutes — but even that is stratospherically higher than the three-minute average wait time in states that received no warning at all from the feds.
“We’ve still got work to do,” acknowledged Robert Knodell, director of the Missouri Department of Social Services.
The warning to Missouri and Kansas comes as state-run Medicaid plans are in a post-pandemic paring down of their patient rolls. Beneficiaries usually renew their applications for aid every year. After COVID-19 forced the country into lockdown, however, the government suspended that requirement throughout the pandemic emergency. That grace period ended this spring.
The problem is that a lot of folks — including many who probably are eligible for continued Medicaid assistance — aren’t renewing their paperwork, often for reasons that may not be in their control. An estimated 45,000 Kansans, two-thirds of them children, have recently had their benefits terminated for “procedural reasons.” In Missouri, roughly 32,000 people were kicked off Medicaid in June, half of them kids.
State call centers are supposed to be a critical link for the people trying to keep those benefits. But that’s not how it is working out in Kansas and Missouri.
Missouri deserves special scrutiny, though.
It was just last month, after all, that the state acknowledged it won’t participate in another federal program — one that would have provided summer meals to Missouri’s hungry kids who had participated in the free or reduced lunch programs at their schools during the 2022-23 school year. Forty states participated in the program this year. Missouri did not. Officials said they simply didn’t have the infrastructure in place to make the plan work this summer.
Put together, the Medicaid and summer meal stumbles make it reasonable to wonder whether the GOP-led government in Jefferson City is able to do the basic work of providing services to the less well-off members of the public — or whether those efforts are simply not a priority.
“It’s no secret our systems have been under-invested in for a long time,” Knodell said.
He said his agency is pushing to improve its responses to Medicaid inquiries with a new “blitz” system that redirects resources to help the call centers. And he said Missourians could bypass the call centers by going online to mydss.mo.gov/renew (Kansans can go to kancare.ks.gov to help move their renewals along.)
That’s a start. But it is time for both Kansas and Missouri to do better. When it comes to Medicaid, long hold times aren’t just frustrating or a matter of inadequate customer service — they’re a threat to the health and well-being of our neighbors.
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St. Louis Post-Dispatch. August 28, 2023.
Editorial: With increasing normalization of marijuana, pot-lounge proposal makes sense
There are all kinds of reasons to be apprehensive about proposals to allow pot-smoking lounges in St. Louis: rowdy clientele, angry neighbors, impaired driving. And, of course, the specter of a societal stamp of approval on an addictive-substance habit.
But there’s one big reason to set those apprehensions aside and give serious consideration to the proposals now being aired in City Hall: Every one of those concerns could apply, unaltered, to establishments currently licensed by St. Louis to serve alcoholic beverages. These establishments — also known as “bars” — operate throughout the city, as they have through most of its history, serving a product that is demonstrably more dangerous than marijuana.
The debate over whether to allow legal use of pot is over. Most of the country has legalized it in one form or another. Its continued classification by the federal government as a Schedule 1 contraband drug, alongside heroin and LSD, is widely recognized as a legal anachronism preserved by Washington’s political paralysis and nothing more.
That’s not to say legalized pot doesn’t bring with it its own potential societal costs. It’s easy to think of a lot of legal and societal trends that would have been healthier for both individuals and society than this one.
But that isn’t the point. If American culture has determined that adults should be allowed to decide for themselves whether to engage in unproductive or even risky behavior — and the legality of alcohol and cigarettes has definitively settled that question — then it makes no sense to continue onerous restrictions on a substance that hasn’t been shown to be as dangerous as either of those.
As the Post-Dispatch’s Austin Huguelet reports, top St. Louis officials are exploring the further normalization of pot by eventually allowing the establishment of pot lounges like those that famously operate in Amsterdam. Only a few American locations — Los Angeles, New York, Chicago, Colorado — have begun to allow such establishments. Meaning St. Louis would be at the forefront of what could be the next big thing in urban entertainment districts.
There are some hurdles, beginning with state rules that don’t allow marijuana to be consumed at the dispensaries where it is purchased. That’s not necessarily an insurmountable problem. The Republicans who control Missouri state government still claim to be fans of free enterprise, so perhaps new rules could be put in place. If not, there are potential work-arounds, like siting the lounges within pickup range of the dispensaries. Entrepreneurs are good at coming up with creative solutions to problems like these.
Board of Aldermen President Megan Green and others exploring the plan are also looking at clean-air concerns — though existing cigar lounges would seem to provide a promising template for how enclosed and controlled indoor space for smoking can theoretically reduce its prevalence elsewhere.
St. Louis officials should tread carefully here. American cities’ experience with this idea is too new to assess whether the benefits are worth the costs. Amsterdam, it must be noted, is starting to restrict international “sin tourism” — which includes (though is not limited to) its pot-friendly coffee houses — because it’s increasingly viewed as not worth the societal problems it brings.
Weighed against those legitimate concerns is the most obvious advantage to the idea: St. Louis could squeeze more tax revenue from a form of recreation that, like it or not, is here to stay. City regulation could keep the businesses out of residential neighborhoods and ensure they’re operating responsibly.
And these particular businesses could become tourism draws, especially while they remain rare in most of America. Bluntly put, St. Louis’ need for fresh economic activity right now precludes being too choosy about what form it takes.
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Jefferson City News Tribune. August 27, 2023.
Editorial: Maybe our children can teach us a lesson
Play fair.
Don’t hit people.
Put things back where you found them.
Clean up your own mess.
Don’t take things that aren’t yours.
Say you’re sorry when you hurt somebody.
Warm cookies and cold milk are good for you.
These seven simple statements were part of the wealth of information American minister and author Robert Fulghum shared in his 1986 bestseller “All I Really Need to Know I Learned in Kindergarten.”
His essays on life resonated deeply with readers who discovered how universal insights can often be found in ordinary events.
Fulghum’s axioms sound eerily similar to a set of standards Missouri educators are drafting for our children in hopes that those “soft skills” can benefit the child throughout his or her life.
The standards go beyond academic competencies; they target “soft skills” such as regulating one’s own emotions, and learning to cooperate and collaborate with others.
The proposed standards were presented to the state board of education and are available for public comment until Sept. 15. At that time, they could be reviewed and potentially revised. A work team would then determine the best way to implement the standards.
Some might say it’s not the job of schools to provide these soft skills.
But let’s face it; schools are dealing with the fallout from declining student behavior. And often times, behavioral issues impede the educator’s ability to teach the disruptive student and those around him or her.
Christi Bergin, a developmental psychologist, said there has been growing concern about student behavior since the 1970s.
“The pandemic accelerated that concern, but it is not new, and it’s not likely to go away as the pandemic recedes because it’s not new,” she said.
And let’s be honest, the absence of those “soft skills” -- being cooperative, collaborative, respectful, kind and trustworthy -- are all too evident in our society today.
If we hope to reverse that trend, maybe our best hope lies with our children.
And frankly, the standards being proposed by the work group may be the right approach.
They are split into three areas:
“Me” standards are geared toward students regulating their emotions and taking accountability for their actions.
“We” standards are about relationship-building and collaboration.
“Others” standards relate to empathy, compassion and understanding how behavior impacts other people.
The objective of the standards is to incorporate them into the daily routine of the students, while allowing the teacher to communicate their expectations to create “teachable moments” on behavior.
As our children learn these new skills, maybe we can emulate them.
At a time when we are seemingly more divided, suspicious and segregated as a society, maybe these standards can spur us to be more collaborative, empathetic and trusting.
And if we learn the lesson well, maybe there’s some cookies and milk in our future.
END
